Then she put it back, and as she did so a little panel at the back of the desk fell forward disclosing a cache containing a bundle of letters tied round with ribbon.

Phyl started as though a hand had been laid on her arm. The point of the paper knife must have touched the spring of the panel, but it seemed as though the desk had suddenly opened its hand, closed and clasping those letters for so many years. For a moment she hesitated to touch them. Then she thought of all the time they had lain there and a feeling that Juliet wouldn't mind and that the old bureau had told its secret without being asked, overcame her scruples. She took the letters and sitting down again on the floor, untied the ribbon.

There were no envelopes. Each sheet of paper had been carefully folded and sealed with green wax, with the seal leaving the impression of the dove. There was no address, and they had evidently been tied together in chronological order. But the handwriting was the handwriting of Juliet Mascarene fully formed now.

The first of these things ran:

"It wasn't my fault. I didn't create old Mr. Gadney and send him to church to keep us talking in the street like that. I did not see you. You couldn't have passed, and if you did you must have been invisible. I feel dreadfully wicked writing to you. Do you know this is a clandestine correspondence and must stop at once? You mustn't ever write to me again, nor I mustn't see you. Of course I can't help seeing you in church and on the street—and I can't help thinking about you. They'll be making me try and stop breathing next. I don't care a button for the whole lot of them. It was all Aunt Susan's doing, only for her my people would never have quarrelled with yours and I wouldn't have been so miserable. I feel sometimes as if I could just take a boat and sail off to somewhere where I would never see any people again.

"It was clever of you to send your letter by P. This goes to you by the same hand."

There was no signature and no date.

Phyl turned the sheet of paper over to make sure again that there was no address. As she did so a faint, quaint perfume came to her as though the old-fashioned soul of the letter were released for a moment. It was vervain, the perfume of long ago, beloved of the Duchesse de Chartres and the ladies of the forties.

She laid the letter down and took up the next.

"It is wicked of you. My people never would be so mean as to quarrel with your people or look down on them because they have lost money. Why did you say that—and you know I said in my last letter that I could not write to you again. I was shocked when P. pinched my arm as I was passing her on the stairs and handed me your note—Don't you—don't you—how shall I say it? Don't you think you and I could meet and speak to one another somewhere instead of always writing like this? Somewhere where no one could see us. Do you know—do you know—do you, ahem! O dear me—know that just inside our gate there's a little arbour. The tiniest place. When I was a child I used to play there with Mary at keeping house, there's a seat just big enough for two and we used to sit there with our dolls. No one can see the gate from the lower piazza, and the gate doesn't make any noise opening, for father had it oiled—it used to squeak a bit from rust, but it doesn't now and I'll be there to-morrow night at nine—in the arbour—at least I may be there. I just want to tell you in a way I can't in a letter that my people aren't the sort of folk to sneer at any one because they have lost money.

"I am sending this by P.

"The arbour is just back of the big magnolia as you come in, on the left."

Phyl gave a little laugh. Then with half-closed eyes she kissed the letter, laid it softly on the floor beside the first and went on to the next.

"Not to-night. I have to go to the Calhouns. It is just as well, for I have a dread of people suspecting if we meet too often. No one sees us meet. No one knows, and yet I fear them finding out just by instinct. Father said to me the other day, 'What makes you seem so happy these times?' If Mary had been alive she would have found out long ago, for I never could keep anything hid from her. I was nearly saying to him, 'If you want to know why I am so happy go and ask the magnolia tree by the gate.'

"Sometimes I feel as if I were deceiving him and everybody. I am, and I don't care—I don't care if they knew. O my darling! My darling! My darling! If the whole world were against you I would love you all the more. I will love you all my life and I will love you when I am dead."

Phyl's eyes grew half blind with tears.

This cry from the Past went to her heart like a knife. The wind, strengthening for a moment, moved the window curtains, bringing with it the drowsy afternoon sounds of Charleston, sounds that seemed to mock at this voice declaring the deathlessness of its love. It was impossible to go on reading. Impossible to expose any more this heart that had ceased to beat.

The meetings in the arbour behind the magnolia tree, the kisses, the words that the leaves and birds alone could hear—they had all ended in death.

It did not matter now if the garden gate creaked on its hinges, or if watching eyes from the piazza saw the glossy leaves stirring when no wind could shake them—nothing mattered at all to these people now.

She put all the letters back in the bureau, carefully closing them in the secret drawer.



CHAPTER VII

"Miss Pinckney," said Phyl that night as they sat at supper, "when you left me this afternoon in Juliet's room I stopped to look at the books and things and when I opened the bureau I touched a spring by accident and a little panel fell out and I found a lot of old letters behind it. It was wrong of me to go meddling about and I thought I ought to tell you."

"Old letters," said Miss Pinckney, "you don't say—what were they about?"

"I read one or two," said the girl. "I'd never, never have dreamed of touching them only—only they were hers—they were to him."

"Rupert?"

"Yes."

"Love letters?"

"Yes."

Miss Pinckney sighed.

"He kept all her letters," said she, "and they came back to her after he was killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war; they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she—well, well, it's all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that those letters should have fallen into your hands."

"Why, strange?"

"Why?" burst out Miss Pinckney. "Why I have dusted that old bureau inside and out a hundred times, and pulled out the drawers and pushed them in and it never shewed sign of having anything in it but emptiness, and you don't do more'n look at it and you find those letters. It's just as if the thing had deceived me. I don't mind, and I don't want to see them, they weren't intended for other eyes than his and hers—and maybe yours since they were shewn you like that."

"Was it wrong of me to look at them?" asked Phyl. "I never would have done it only—only—Oh, I don't know, I somehow felt she wouldn't mind. She seemed like a sister—I would never dream of looking at another person's letters but she did not seem like another person. I can't explain. It was just as though the letters were my own—just exactly as though they were my own when I found them in my hands."

Phyl was talking with her eyes fixed before her as though she were looking across some great distance.

Miss Pinckney gave a little shiver, then supper being over she rose from the table and led the way from the room.

Richard Pinckney had dined with them but he was out for supper somewhere or another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for more than a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced.

The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call in like this without ceremony; Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckney about some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had not been five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to look at her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, the red headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances' type dread red haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as her own property to be protected against all comers.

All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful and armed.

Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney's dispraise of her, was a most formidable person as far as the opposite sex was concerned. One of the women of whom other women say, "Well, I don't know what he sees in her, I'm sure."

A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, full curved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of the world and the flesh—with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansy blue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black.

"Well, I'll subscribe ten dollars," said Miss Pinckney; "I reckon the darkie babies won't be any the worse for a creche and maybe not very much better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil good manners and respect for their betters into their heads I'd give you forty. I'm sure I don't know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to, one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk the other day, bag of impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery leery what-d'-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces s'nough to raise Cain in any one's heart."

"I know," replied the dark girl, "and they are getting worse; the whip is the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists."

"Don't call them my beautiful Abolitionists," replied the other. "I didn't make 'em. All the same I don't believe in whipping and never did. It's the whip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk like Christians slavery would have been the greatest god-send to blacks. It was what stays are to women. But they didn't. The low down white made slavery impossible with his whipping and oppression and we had to suffer. Well, we haven't ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying like rabbits there's no knowing what we've got to suffer yet."

Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. "Now, that girl," said the elder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, "is just the type of the people I was telling her about. No idea but whipping. She wouldn't have much mercy on a human creature black or tan or white. Thick skinned. She didn't even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what brought her here this hour with her creche. It's just a fad. If they got up a charity to make alligator bait of the black babies so's to sell the alligator skins to buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it'd be all the same to her. Something to gad about with. I wish I'd kept that ten dollars in my pocket."

Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night—before ten—and Phyl, who was free to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching the moon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a plan that had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckney for bed.

She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dial becoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mystery which is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn.

Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of the northern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at times and in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one is walking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed lit by a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would never lose the charm of dawn.

Yet the garden to which she would now turn her eyes shewed nothing of this. Night reigned there from the cherokee roses moving in the wind to the carnations motionless, moon stricken, deathly white.

Sure that Miss Pinckney would not come down again, Phyl rose and crossed the garden towards the gate.

She wanted to see if the trysting place behind the magnolia and the bushes that grew about it were still there.

At the gate she paused for a moment, glancing back at the house as Juliet Mascarene might have done on those evenings when she had an appointment with her lover. Then, pushing through the bushes and past the magnolia trees she found herself in a little half moonlit space, a natural arbour through whose roof of leaves the moonlight came in quavering shafts. She stood for a moment absolutely still whilst her eyes accustomed themselves to the light. Then she began to search for the seat she guessed to be there, and found it. It was between an oak bole and the wall of the garden, and the bushes behind had grown so that their branches half covered it. Neglected, forsaken, unknown, perhaps, to the people now living in Vernons it had lingered with the fidelity of inanimate things, protected by the foliage of the southern garden from prying eyes.

She pushed back the leaves and branches and bent them out of the way, then she took her seat, and as she did so several of the bent branches released themselves and closed half round her in a delightful embrace.

From here she could see brokenly the garden and the walk leading from the gate, with the light of the moon now strong upon the walk. The night sounds of the street just beyond the wall came mixed with the stir of foliage as the wind from the sea pressed over the trees like the hand of a mesmerist inducing sleep.

So it was here that Juliet Mascarene had sat with Rupert Pinckney on those summer nights when the world was younger, before the war. The war that had changed everything whilst leaving the roses untouched and the moonlight the same on the bird-haunted garden of Vernons.

Everything was the same here in this little space of flowers and trees. But the lovers had vanished.

"For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain." The words strayed across Phyl's mind brought up by recollection. "He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay."

The trees seemed whispering it, the eternal statement that leaves the eternal question unanswered.

The garden was talking to her, the night, the very bushes that clasped her in a half embrace; perfumes, moonlight, the voice of the wind, all were part of the spell that bound her, held her, whispered to her. It was as though the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in a glass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life.

Vainly, for as she sat watching in imagination the forms of the lost lovers parting there at the gate, suddenly there came upon her a stirring of the soul, a joyous uplifting as though wings had been given to her mind for one wild second raising it to the heights beyond earthly knowledge.

"Love can never die."

It was as though some ghostly voice had whispered this fact in her ear.

Juliet was not dead nor the man she loved, changed maybe but not dead. In some extraordinary way she knew it as surely as though she herself had once been Juliet.

Religion to Phyl had meant little, the Bible a book of fair promises and appalling threats, vague promises but quite definite threats. As a quite small child she had gathered the impression that she was sure to be damned unless she managed to convert herself into a quite different being from the person she knew herself to be. Death was the supreme bogey, the future life a thing not to be thought of if one wanted to be happy.

Yet now, just as if she had been through it all, the truth came flooding on her like a golden sea, the truth that life never loses touch with life, that the body is only a momentary manifestation of the ever living spirit.

Meeting Street, the old house so full of memories, Juliet's letters, the garden, they had all been stretching out arms to her, trying to tell her something, whispering, suggesting, and now all these vague voices had become clear, as though strengthened by the moonlight and the mystery of night.

Clear as lip-spoken words came the message:

"You have lived before and we say this to you, we, the things that knew you and loved you in a past life."

A step that halted outside close to the garden gate broke the spell, the gate turned on its hinges shewing through its trellis work the form of a man. It was Pinckney just returned from some supper-party or club.

Phyl caught her breath back. Suddenly, and at the sight of Pinckney, Prue's words of that morning entered her mind.

"Miss Julie, Massa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at de gate t'night same's las' night. Done you let on as I told you."

And here he was, the man who had been occupying her thoughts and who was beginning to occupy her dreams, and here she was as though waiting for him by appointment.

But there was much more than that. Worlds and worlds more than that, a whole universe of happiness undreamed of.

She rose from the seat and the parted bushes rustled faintly as they closed behind her.

Pinckney, who had just shut the gate, heard the whisper of the leaves, he turned and saw a figure standing half in shadow and half in moonlight. For a moment he was startled, fancying it a stranger, then he saw that it was Phyl.

"Hullo," said he. "Why, Phyl, what are you doing here?"

The commonplace question shattered everything like a false note in music.

"Nothing," she answered. Then without a word more she ran past him and vanished into the house.

Pinckney cast the stump of his cigar away.

"What on earth is the matter with her now?" said he to himself. "What on earth have I done?"

The word she had uttered carried half a sob with it, it might have been the last word of a quarrel.

He stood for a moment glancing around. The wild idea had entered his mind that she had been there to meet some one and that his intrusion had put her out.

But there was no one in the garden; nothing but the trees and the flowers, wind shaken and lit by the moon, the same placid moon that had lit the garden of Vernons for the lovers of whom he knew nothing except by hearsay, and for whom he cared nothing at all.



CHAPTER VIII

When Phyl awoke from sleep next morning, the brightness of the South had lost some of its charm.

Something magical that had been forming in her mind and taking its life from Vernons had been shattered last night by Pinckney's commonplace question.

This morning, looking back on yesterday, she could remember details but she could not recapture the essence. The exaltation that had raised her above and beyond herself. It was like the remembrance of a rose contrasted with the reality.

The whole day had been working up to that moment in the little arbour, when her mind, tricked or led, had risen to heights beyond thought, to happiness beyond experience, only to be cast down from those heights by the voice of reality.

The thing was plain enough to common sense; she had let herself be over-ruled by Imagination, working upon splendid material. Prue's message, her own likeness to Juliet, Juliet's letters, the little arbour, those and the magic of Vernons had worked upon her mind singly and together, exalting her into a soul-state utterly beyond all previous experience.

It was as though she had played the part of Juliet for a day, suffered vaguely and enjoyed in imagination what Juliet had suffered and enjoyed in life, known Love as Juliet had known it—for a moment.

The brutal touch of the Real coming at the supreme moment to shatter and shrivel everything.

And the strange thing was that she had no regrets.

Looking back on yesterday, the things that had happened seemed of little interest. Sleep seemed to have put an Atlantic ocean between her and them.

Coming down to breakfast she found Pinckney just coming in from the garden; he said nothing about the incident of the night before, nor did she, there were other things to talk about. Seth, one of the darkies, had been 'kicking up shines,' he had given impudence to Miss Pinckney that morning. Impudence to Miss Pinckney! You can scarcely conceive the meaning of that statement without a personal knowledge of Miss Pinckney, and a full understanding of the magic of her rule.

Seth was, even now, packing up the quaint contraptions he called his luggage, and old Darius, the coloured odd job man, was getting a barrow out of the tool-house to wheel the said luggage to Seth's grandmother's house, somewhere in the negro quarters of the town. The whole affair of the impudence and dismissal had not taken two minutes, but the effects were widespread and lasting. Dinah was weeping, the kitchen in confusion; one might have thought a death had occurred in the house, and Miss Pinckney presiding at the breakfast table was voluble and silent by turns.

"Never mind," said Pinckney with all the light-heartedness of a man towards domestic affairs. "Seth's not the only nigger in Charleston."

"I'm not bothering about his going," replied Miss Pinckney. "He was all thumbs and of no manner of use but to make work; what upsets me is the way he hid his nature. Time and again I've been good to that boy. He looked all black grin and frizzled head, nothing bad in him you'd say—and then! It's like opening a cupboard and finding a toad, and there's Dinah going on like a fool; she's crying because he's going, not because he gave me impudence. Rachel's the same, and I'm just going now to the kitchen to give them a talking to all round."

Off she went.

"I know what that means," said Pinckney. "It's only once in a couple of years that there's any trouble with servants and then—oh, my! You see Aunt Maria is not the same as other people because she loves every one dearly, and looks on the servants as part of the family. I expect she loves that black imp Seth, for all his faults, and that's what makes her so upset."

"Same as I was about Rafferty," said Phyl with a little laugh.

Pinckney laughed also and their eyes met. Just like a veil swept aside, something indefinable that had lain between them, some awkwardness arising, maybe, from the Rafferty incident, vanished in that moment.

Phyl had been drawing steadily towards him lately, till, unknown to her, he had entered into the little romance of Juliet, so much so that if last night, at that magical moment when he met her on entering the gate—if at that moment he had taken her in his arms and kissed her, Love might have been born instantly from his embrace.

But the psychological moment had passed, a crisis unknown to him and almost unknown to her.

And now, as if to seal the triumph of the commonplace, suddenly, the vague reservation that had lain between them, disappeared.

"Do you know," said he, "you taught me a lesson that day, a lesson every man ought to be taught before he leaves college."

"What was that?" asked Phyl.

"Never to interfere in household affairs. Of course Rafferty wasn't exactly a household affair because he belonged mostly to the stable, still he was your affair more than mine. Household affairs belong to women, and men ought to leave them alone."

"Maybe you're right," said Phyl, "but all the same I was wrong. Do you know I've never apologised for what I said."

"What did you say?" asked he with an artless air of having forgotten.

"Oh, I said—things, and—I apologise."

"And I said—things, and I apologise—come on, let's go out. I have no business this morning and I'd like to show you the town—if you'd care to come."

"What about Miss Pinckney?" asked Phyl.

"Oh, she's all right," he replied. "The Seth trouble will keep her busy till lunch time and I'll leave word we've gone out for a walk."

Phyl ran upstairs and put on her hat. As they were passing through the garden the thought came to her just for a moment to show him the little arbour; then something stopped her, a feeling that this humble little secret was not hers to give away, and a feeling that Pinckney wouldn't care. Dead lovers vanished so long and their affairs would have little interest for his practical mind.

The morning was warmer even than yesterday. The joyous, elusive, intoxicating spirit of the Southern spring was everywhere, the air seemed filled with the dust of sunbeams, filled with fragrance and lazy sounds. The very business of the street seemed part of a great universal gaiety over which the sky heat hazy beyond the Battery rose in a dome of deep, sublime tranquil blue.

They stopped to inspect the old slave market.

Then the remains of the building that had once been the old Planters Hotel held Phyl like a wizard whilst Pinckney explained its history. Here in the old days the travelling carriages had drawn up, piled with the luggage of fine folk on a visit to Charleston on business or pleasure. The Planters was known all through the Georgias and Virginia, all through the States in the days when General Washington and John C. Calhoun were living figures.

The ghost of the place held Phyl's imagination. Just as Meeting Street seemed filled with friendly old memories on her first entering it, so did the air around the ruins of the "Planters."

Then having paused to admire the gouty pillars of St. Michael's they went into the church.

The silence of an empty church is a thing apart from all other silences in the world. Deeper, more complete, more filled with voices.

As they were entering a negro caretaker engaged in dusting and tidying let something fall, and as the silence closed in on the faint echo that followed the sound they stopped, just by the font to look around them. Here the spirit of spring was not. The shafts of sunlight through the windows lit the old fashioned box pews, the double decked pulpit, and the font crowned with the dove with the light of long ago. Sunday mornings of the old time assuredly had found sanctuary here and the old congregations had not yet quite departed.

The occasional noise of the caretaker as he moved from pew to pew scarcely disturbed the tranquillity, the scene was set beyond the reach of the sounds and daily affairs of this world, and the actors held in a medium unshakable as that which holds the ghostly life of bees in amber and birds in marqueterie.

"That was George Washington's pew," whispered Pinckney, "at least the one he sat in once. That's the old Pinckney pew, belonged to Bures—other people sit there now. This is our pew—Vernons. The Mascarenes had it in the old days, of course."

Phyl looked at the pew where Juliet Mascarene had sat often enough, no doubt, whilst the preacher had preached on the vanity of life, on the delusions of the world and the shortness of Time.

Many an eloquent divine had stood in the pulpit of St. Michael's, but none have ever preached a sermon so poignant, so real, so searching as that which the old church preaches to those who care to hear.

They turned to go.

Outside Phyl was silent and Pinckney seemed occupied by thoughts of his own. They had got to that pleasant stage of intimacy where conversation can be dropped without awkwardness and picked up again haphazard, but you cannot be silent long in the streets of Charleston on a spring day. They visited the market-place and inspected the buzzards and then, somehow, without knowing it, they drifted on to the water side. Here where the docks lie deserted and the green water washes the weed grown and rotting timbers of wharves they took their seats on a baulk of timber to rest and contemplate things.

"There used to be ships here once," said he. "Lots of ships—but that was before the war."

He was silent and Phyl glanced sideways at him, wondering what was in his mind. She soon found out. A struggle was going on between his two selves, his business self that demanded up-to-dateness, bustle, and the energetic conduct of affairs, and his other self that was content to let things lie, to see Charleston just as she was, unspoiled by the thing we call Business Prosperity. It was a battle between the South and the North in him.

He talked it out to her. Went into details, pointed to Galveston and New Orleans, those greedy sea mouths that swallow the goods of the world and give out cotton, whilst Charleston lay idle, her wharves almost deserted, her storehouses empty.

He spoke almost vehemently, spoke as a business man speaks of wasted chances and things neglected. Then, when he had finished, the girl put in her word.

"Well," said she, "it may be so but I don't want it any different from what it is."

Pinckney laughed, the laugh of a man who is confessing a weakness.

"I don't know that I do either," said he.

It was rank blasphemy against Business. At the club you would often find him bemoaning the business decay of the city he loved, but here, sitting by the girl on the forsaken wharf, in the sunshine, the feeling suddenly came to him that there was something here that business would drive away. Something better than Prosperity.

It was as though he were looking at things for a moment through her eyes.

They came back through the sunlit streets to find Miss Pinckney recovered from the Seth business, and after luncheon that day, assisted by Dinah and the directions of Miss Pinckney, Phyl's hair "went up."

"It's beautiful," said the old lady, as she contemplated the result, "and more like Juliet than ever. Take the glass and look at yourself."

Phyl did.

She did not see the beauty but she saw the change. Her childhood had vanished as though some breath had blown it away in the magic mirror.

PART III



CHAPTER I

In a fortnight Phyl had adjusted herself to her new environment so completely that to use Pinckney's expression, she might have been bred and born in Charleston.

Custom and acquaintanceship had begun to dull without destroying the charm of the place and the ghostly something, the something that during the first two days had seemed to haunt Vernons, the something indefinable she had called "It" had withdrawn.

The spell, whatever it was, had been broken that night in the garden, when Pinckney's commonplace remark had shattered the dream-state into which she had worked herself with the assistance of Prue, Juliet's letters, the little secret arbour and the moonlight of the South.

One morning, coming down to breakfast, she found Miss Pinckney in agitation, an open telegram in one hand and a feather duster in the other.

It was one of the early morning habits of Miss Pinckney to range the house superintending things with a feather duster in hand, not so much for use as for the purpose of encouraging others. She was in the breakfast room now dusting spasmodically things that did not require dusting and talking all the time, pausing every now and then to have another glance at the telegram whilst Richard Pinckney, unable to get a word in, sat on a chair, and Jim, the little coloured page, who had brought in the urn, stood by listening and admiring.

"Forty miles from here and ten from a railway station," said Miss Pinckney, "and how am I to get there?"

"Automobile," said Pinckney.

It was evidently not his first suggestion as to this means of locomotion, for the suggestion was received without an outburst, neither resented nor assented to in fact. They took their seats at table and then it all came out.

Colonel Seth Grangerson of Grangerson House, Grangerville, S. Carolina, was ill. Miss Pinckney was his nearest relative, the nearest at least with whom he was not fighting, and he had wired to her, or rather his son had wired to her, to come at once.

"As if I were a bird," said the old lady. Grangerville was a backwater place, badly served by the railway, and it would take the best part of a day to get there by ordinary means.

"A car will get you there inside a couple of hours," said Pinckney.

"As if he couldn't have sent for Susan Revenall," went on she as though oblivious to the suggestion, "but I suppose he's fought with them again. I patched up a peace between them last midsummer, but I suppose the patches didn't stick; he's fought with the Revenalls, he's fought with the Calhouns, he's fought with the Beauregards, he's fought with the Tredegars—that man would fight with his own front teeth if he couldn't get anything better to fight with, and now he's dying I expect he reckons to have a fight with me, just to finish off with. He killed his poor wife, and Dick Grangerson would never have gone off and got drowned only for him—Oh, he's not so bad," turning to Phyl, "he's good enough only for that—will fight."

"Too much pep," said Pinckney.

"I'm sure I don't know what it is. They're the queerest lot the Almighty ever put feet on, and I don't mind saying it, even though they are relatives." Turning to Phyl. "I suppose you know, least I suppose you think, that the Civil War was fought for the emancipation of the darkies and that they were emancipated."

"Yes!"

"Well, they weren't—at least not at Grangersons. While the Colonel's father was fighting in the Civil War, his first wife, she was a Dawson, kept things going at home, and after the war was over and he was back he took up the rule again. Emancipation—no one would have dared to say the word to him, he'd have killed you with a look. The North never beat Grangerson, it beat Davis and one man and another but it never beat Grangerson, he carried on after the war just as he carried on before, told the darkies that emancipation was nigger talk and they believed him. People came round telling them they were free, and all they got was broken heads. They were a very tetchy lot, those niggers, are still what are left of them. You see, they've always been proud of being Grangerson's niggers, that's the sort of man he is, able to make them feel like that."

"Silas helps to carry on the place, doesn't he?" asked Pinckney.

"Yes, and just in the same tradition, only he's finding it doesn't work, I suspect. You see, the old darkies are all right, but when he's forced to get new labour he has to get the new darkies and they're all wrong, and he thrashes them and they run away. They never take the law of him either. I reckon when they get clear of Silas they don't stop running till they get to Galveston."

They talked of other things and then, breakfast over, Miss Pinckney turned to Richard.

"Well, what about that automobile?"

"I'll have one at the door for you at ten," said he.

She turned to Phyl.

"You'd better go with me—if you'd like to; you'd be lonely here all by yourself, and you may as well see Grangersons whilst the old man's there, though maybe he'll be gone before we arrive. We may be there for a couple of days, so you'd better take enough things."

Then she went off to dress herself for the journey, and an hour later she appeared veiled and apparelled, Dick following her with the luggage, a bandbox and a bag of other days.

She got into the big touring car without a word. Phyl followed her and Pinckney tucked the rug round their knees.

"You've got the most careful driver in Charleston," said he, "and he knows the road."

Miss Pinckney nodded.

She was flying straight in the face of her pet prejudice. She was not in the least afraid of a break down or an overset. An accident that did not rob her of life or limb would indeed have been an opportunity for saying "I told you so." She was chiefly afraid of running over things.

As Pinckney was closing the door on them who should appear but Seth—Seth in a striped sleeved jacket, all grin and frizzled head and bearing a bunch of flowers in his hand. He had not been dismissed after all. When Miss Pinckney had gone into the kitchen to pay him his wages he had carried on so that she forgave him. The flowers—her own flowers just picked from the garden—were an offering, not to propitiate but to please.

Pinckney laughed, but Miss Pinckney as she took the bouquet scarcely noticed either him or Seth, her mind was busy with something else.

She leaned over towards the chauffeur.

"Mind you don't run over any chickens," said she.

It was a gorgeous morning, with the sea mists blowing away on the sea wind, swamp-land and river and bayou showing streets and ponds of sapphire through the vanishing haze.

Phyl was in high spirits; the tune of Camptown Races, which a street boy had been whistling as they started, pursued her. Miss Pinckney, dumb through the danger zone where chickens and dogs and nigger children might be run over, found her voice in the open country.

The bunch of flowers presented to her by Seth and which she was holding on her lap started her off.

"I hope it is not a warning," said she; "wouldn't be a bit surprised to find Seth Grangerson in his coffin waiting for the flowers to be put on him; what put it in to the darkey's head to give me them! I don't know, I'm sure, same thing I suppose that put it into his head to give me impudence."

"You've taken him back," said Phyl.

"Well, I suppose I have," said the other in a resigned voice, "and likely to pay for my foolishness."

Pinckney had said that it was only a two hours' run from Charleston to Grangerville, but he had reckoned without taking into consideration the badness of some of the roads, and the intricacies of the way, for it was after one o'clock when they reached the little town beyond which, a mile to the West, lay the Colonel's house.

Grangerville lies on the border of Clarendon county, a tiny place that yet supports a newspaper of its own, the Grangerville Courier. The Courier office, the barber's shop and the hotel are the chief places in Grangerville, and yellow dogs and black children seem the bulk of the population, at least of a warm afternoon, when drowsiness holds the place in her keeping, and the light lies broad and steadfast and golden upon the cotton fields, and the fields of Indian corn, and the foliage of the woods that spread to southward, enchanted woods, fading away into an enchanted world of haze and sun and silence.

When the great Southern moon rises above the cotton fields, Romance touches even Grangerville itself, the baying of the yellow dog, darkey voices, the distant plunking of a banjo, the owl in the trees—all are the same as of old—and the houses are the same, nearly, and the people, and it is hard to believe that over there to the North the locomotives of the Atlantic Coast railway are whistling down the night, that men are able to talk to one another at a distance of a thousand miles, fly like birds, live like fish, and perpetuate their shadows in the "movies."

Grangersons lay a mile beyond the little town, a solidly built mansion set far back from the road, and approached by an avenue of cypress. As they drew up before the pillared piazza, upon which the front door opened, from the doorway, wide open this warm day, appeared an old gentleman.

A very fine looking old man he was. His face, with its predominant nose, long white moustache and firm cleft chin, was of that resolute and obstinate type which seems a legacy of the Roman Empire, whose legionaries left much more behind them in Gaul and Britain than Trajan arches and Roman roads. He was dressed in light grey tweeds, his linen was immaculate—youthful and still a beau in point of dress, and bearing himself erect with the aid of a walking stick, a crutch handled stick of clouded malacca, Colonel Seth Grangerson, for he it was, had come to his front door, drawn by the sound of the one thing he detested more than anything in life, a motor car.

"Why, Lord! He's not even in bed," cried the outraged Miss Pinckney, who recognised him at once. "All this journey and he up and about—it beats Seth and his impudence!"

The Colonel, whose age dimmed eyes saw nothing but the automobile, came down the steps, panama hat in hand, courtly, freezing, yet ready to explode on the least provocation. Within touch of the car he recognised the chief occupant.

"Why, God bless my soul," cried he, "it's Maria Pinckney."

"Yes, it's me," said the lady, "and I expected to find you in bed or worse, and here you are up. Silas sent me a telegram."

"He's a fool," cut in the old gentleman. "I had one of my old attacks last night, and I told him I'd be up and about in the morning—and I am. Good Gad! Maria, you're the last person in the world I'd ever have expected to see in one of these outrageous things." He had opened the door of the car and was presenting his arm to the lady.

"You can shut the door," said Miss Pinckney. "I'm not getting out. The thing's not more outrageous than your getting up like that right after an attack and dragging me a hundred miles from Charleston over hill and dale—I'm not getting out, I'm going right back—right back to Charleston."

The Colonel turned his head and called to a darkey that had appeared at the front door.

"Take the luggage in," said he. Miss Pinckney got out of the car despite herself, half laughing, half angry, and taking the gallantly proffered arm found herself being led up the steps of Grangersons, pausing half way up to introduce Phyl, whom she had completely forgotten till now.

The Colonel, like his son Silas, as will presently be seen, had a direct way with women; the Grangersons had pretty nearly always fallen in love at sight and run away with their wives. Colonel Seth's father had done this, meeting, marrying and fascinating the beautiful Maria Tredegar, and carrying her off under his arm like a hypnotised fowl, and from under the noses of half a dozen more eligible suitors, just as now, the Colonel was carrying Maria Pinckney off into his house half against her will. Phyl following them, gazed round at the fine old oak panelled hall, from which they were led into the drawing room, a room not unlike the drawing room at Vernons, but larger and giving a view of the garden where the oleanders and cherokee money and the crescent leaves of the blue gum trees were moving in the wind. Colonel Seth, despite the war, had plenty of roses and Grangersons was kept up in the old style. Just as in Nuremberg and Vittoria we see mediaeval cities preserved, so to speak, under glass, so at Grangersons one found the old Plantation, house and all, miraculously intact, living, almost, one might say, breathing.

The price of cotton did not matter much to the Colonel, nor the price of haulage. This son of the Southerner who had refused to be beaten by the North in the war, cared for nothing much beyond the ring of sky that made his horizon. Twice a year he made a visit to Charleston, driving in his own carriage, occasionally he visited Richmond or Durham, where he had an interest in tobacco; New York he had never seen. He loathed railways and automobiles, mainly, perhaps, because they were inventions of the North, that is to say the devil. He had a devilish hatred of the North. Not of Northerners, but just of the North.

The word North set his teeth on edge. It did not matter to him that Charleston was picking up some prosperity in the way of phosphates, or that Chattanooga was smelting ore into money, or that industrial prosperity was abroad in the land; he was old enough to have a recollection of old days, and from the North had come the chilly blast that had blown away that age.

A servant brought in cake and wine to stay the travellers till dinner time, refreshment that Miss Pinckney positively refused at first.

"You will stay the night," said the Colonel, as he helped her, "and Sarah will show you to your rooms when we have had a word together."

Miss Pinckney, sipping her wine, made no reply, then placing the scarcely touched glass on the table and with her bonnet strings thrown back, she turned to the Colonel.

"Do you see the likeness?" said she.

"What likeness?" asked the old gentleman.

"Why, God bless my soul, the likeness to Juliet Mascarene. Phyl, turn your face to the light."

The Colonel, searching in his waistcoat pocket, found a pair of folding glasses and put them on.

"She gets it from her mother's side," said Miss Pinckney, "the Lord knows how it is these things happen, but it's Juliet, isn't it?"

The Colonel removed his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, and returned them to his pocket.

"It is," said he. Then in the fine old fashion he turned to the girl, raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

"Phyl," said Miss Pinckney, "would not you like to have a look at the garden whilst we have a chat? Old people's talk isn't of much interest to young people."

"Old people," cried the warrior. "There are no old people in this room." He made for the door and opened it for Phyl, then he accompanied her into the hall, where at the still open door he pointed the way to the garden.



CHAPTER II

Outside Phyl stood for a moment to breathe the warm scented air and look around her.

To be treated like a child by any other person than Maria Pinckney would have incensed her, all the same to be told to do a thing because it was good for her, or because it was a pleasant thing to do, in the teller's opinion, was an almost certain way of making her do the exact opposite.

The garden did not attract her, the place did.

That cypress avenue with the sun upon it, that broad sweep of drive in front of the house, the distant peeps of country between trees and the languorous lazy atmosphere of the perfect day fascinated her mind. She came along the house front to the right, and found herself at the gate of the stable yard.

The stable yard of Grangersons was an immense flagged quadrangle bounded on the right, counting from the point of entrance, by the kitchen premises.

There was stable room for forty horses, coach-house accommodation for a dozen or more carriages.

The car had been run into one of the coach-houses and the yard stood empty, sunlit, silent, save for the voices of the pigeons wheeling in the air, or strutting on the roof of the great barn adjoining the stables.

One of the stable doors was open and as Phyl crossed the yard a young man appeared at the open door, shaded his eyes and looked at her. Then he came forward. It was Silas Grangerson, and Phyl thought he was the handsomest and most graceful person she had ever seen in her life.

Silas was a shade over six feet in height, dark, straight, slim yet perfectly proportioned; his face was extraordinary, the most vivid thing one would meet in a year's journey, and with a daring, and at times, almost a mad look unforgettable when once glimpsed. Like the Colonel and like his ancestors Silas had a direct way with women.

"Hallo," said he, with the sunny smile of old acquaintanceship, "where have you sprung from?"

Phyl was startled for a moment, then almost instantly she came in touch with the vein and mood and mind of the other and laughed.

"I came with Miss Pinckney," said she.

"You're not from Charleston?"

"Yes, indeed I am."

"But where do you live in Charleston? I've never seen you and I know every—besides you don't look as if you belonged to Charleston—I don't believe you've come from there."

"Then where do you think I've come from?"

"I don't know," said Silas laughing, "but it doesn't matter as long as you're here, does it? 'Scuse my fooling, won't you—I wouldn't with a stranger, but you don't seem a stranger somehow—though I don't know your name."

"Phylice Berknowles," said Phyl, glancing up at him and half wondering how it was that, despite his good looks, his manhood, and their total unacquaintanceship, she felt as little constrained in his presence as though he were a boy.

"And my name is Silas Grangerson. Say, is Maria Pinckney in the house with father?"

"She is."

"Talking over old times, I s'pose?" said Silas.

"Yes!"

"I can hear them. It's always the same when they get together—and I suppose you got sick of it and came out?"

"No, they put me out—asked me wouldn't I like to look at the garden."

Already she had banded herself with him in mild opposition to the elders.

"Great—Jerusalem. They're just like a pair of old horses wanting to be left quiet and rub their nose-bags together. Look at the garden! I can hear them—come on and look at the horses."

He led the way to a loose box and opened the upper door.

"That's Flying Fox, she's mine, the fastest trotter in the Carolinas—you know anything about horses?"

"Rather!"

"I thought you did, somehow. Mind! she doesn't take to strangers. Mind! she bites like an alligator."

"Not me," said Phyl, fondling the lovely but fleering-eyed head protruding above the lower door.

"So she doesn't," said Silas admiringly, "she's taken to you—well, I don't blame her. Here's John Barleycorn," opening another door, "own brother to the Fox, he's Pap's; he's a bolter, and kicks like a duck gun. She's got all her vice at one end of her and he at the other, match pair." He whistled between his teeth as he put up the bars, then he shewed other horses, Phyl watching his every movement, and wondering what it was that gave pleasure to her in watching. Silas moved, or seemed to move, absolutely without effort, and his slim brown hands touched everything delicately, as though they were touching fragile porcelain, yet those same hands could bend an iron bar, or rein in John Barleycorn even when the bit was between the said J. B.'s teeth.

"That's the horses," said he, flinging open a coach-house door, "and that's the shandrydan the governor still drives in when he goes to Charleston. Look at it. It was made in the forties, and you should see it with a darkey on the box and Pap inside, and all his luggage behind, and he going off to Charleston, and the nigger children running after it."

Phyl inspected the mustard-yellow vehicle. Then he closed the door on it, put up the bar, and, the business of showing things over, did a little double shuffle as though Phyl were not present, or as though she were a boy friend and not a strange young woman.

"Say, do you like poetry?" said he, breaking off and seeming suddenly to remember her presence.

"No," said Phyl. "At least—"

"Well, here's some.

"'There was an old hen and she had a wooden leg, She went to the barn and she laid a wooden egg, She laid it right down by the barn—don't you think.'"

"Well?" said she, laughing.

"'It's just about time for another little drink—' some sense in poetry like that, isn't there? But all the drinks are in the house and I don't want to go in. I'm hiding from Pap. Last night when he was ratty with rheumatism, he let out at me, saying the young people weren't any good, saying Maria Pinckney was the only person he knew with sense in her head, called me a name because I poured him out a dose of liniment instead of medicine, by mistake—though he didn't swallow it—and wished Maria was here. So I just sent Jake, the page boy, off with a wire to her; didn't tell any one, just sent it. Come on and look at the garden—you've got to look at the garden, you know."

He led the way past the barn to a farmyard, where hens were clucking and scratching and scraping in the sunshine; the deep double bass grunting of pigs came from the sties, by the low wall across which one could see the country stretching far away, the cotton fields, the woods, all hazed by the warmth of the afternoon.

"Let's sit down and look at the garden," said he, pointing to a huge log by the near wall—"and aren't the convolvuluses beautiful?"

"Beautiful," said Phyl, falling into the vein of the other. "And listen to the roses."

"They grunt like that because it's near dinner time—they're pretty much like humans." He took a cigarette case from his pocket and a cigarette from the case.

"You don't mind smoking, do you?"

"Not a bit."

"Have one?"

"I daren't."

"Maria Pinckney won't know."

"It's not her—I smoked one once and it made me sick."

"Well, try another—I won't look if you are."

"They'll—she'll smell it."

"Not she, you can eat some parsley, that takes the smell away."

"Oh, I don't mind telling her—it's only—well, there."

She took a cigarette and he lit it for her.

"Blow it through your nose," he commanded, "that's the way. Now let's pretend we're two old darkies sitting on a log, you push against me and I'll push against you, you're Jim and I'm Uncle Joseph. 'What yo' crowding me for, Jim,'" he squeezed up gently against her, and Phyl jumped to her feet.

He glanced up at her, sideways, laughing, and for the life of her she could not be angry.

"Don't you think we'd better go and look at the garden?" said she.

"In a minute, sit down again. I won't knock against you. It was only my fun. We'll pretend I'm Pap, and you're Maria Pinckney, if you like. You've let your cigarette go out."

"So I have."

"You can light it from mine."

Phyl hesitated and was lost.

It was the nearest thing to a kiss, and as she drew back with the lighted cigarette between her lips, she felt a not unpleasant sense of wickedness, such as the virtuous boy feels when led to adventure by the bad boy. Sitting on a log, smoking cigarettes, talking familiarly with a stranger, taking a light from him in such a fashion with her face so close to his that his eyes— They smoked in silence for a moment.

Then Silas spoke:

"Do you ever feel lonesome?" said he.

"Awfully—sometimes."

"So do I."

Silence for a moment. Then:

"I go off to Charleston when I feel like that—once in a fortnight or so—Where do you live in Charleston?"

"I live with Miss Pinckney—I thought you knew."

"You didn't say that. You only said you came with her."

"Well, I live with her at Vernons. I'm Irish, y' know. My—my father died in Charleston, and I came from Ireland to live with Miss Pinckney. Mr. Richard Pinckney is my guardian."

"Your which? Dick Pinckney your guardian! Why, he's not older than I am—that fellow your guardian—why, he wears a flannel petticoat."

"He doesn't," cried Phyl, flinging away the cigarette, which had become noxious, and roused to sudden anger by the slighting tone of the other. "What do you mean by saying such a thing?"

"Oh, I only meant that he's too awfully proper for this life. He goes to Charleston races, but never backs a horse, scarcely, and one Mint Julep would make him see two crows. He's a sort of distant relation of ours."

Phyl was silent. She resented his criticism of her friend, and just in this moment the something mad and harum scarum in the character of Silas seemed shown up to her with electrical effect. Criticism is a most dangerous thing to indulge in, unless anonymously in the pages of a journal, for the right to criticise has to be made good in the mind of the audience, unless the audience is hostile to the criticised.

Then she said: "I don't know anything about Mint Juleps or race courses, but I do know that Mr. Pinckney has been—is—is my friend, and I'd rather not talk about him, if you please."

"Now, you're huffed," cried Silas exultingly, as though he had scored a point at some game.

"I'm not."

"You are—you've flushed."

Phyl turned pale, a deadly sign.

"I'd never dream of getting out of temper with you," said she.

It was his turn to flush. You might have struck Silas Grangerson without upsetting his balance, but the slightest suspicion of a sneer raised all the devil in him. Had Phyl been a man he would have knocked him off the log. He cast the stump of his cigarette on the ground and pounded it with his heel. Had there been anything breakable within reach he would have broken it. Her anger with him vanished and she laughed.

"You've flushed now," said she.



CHAPTER III

When they came round to the front of the house they found Colonel Grangerson and Miss Pinckney coming down the steps.

They were going to the garden in search of Phyl.

"We've been looking at the horses," said Silas, after he had greeted Miss Pinckney. "No, sir, I did not leave any of the doors open, but I've been looking for Sam with a blacksnake whip to liven him up. He left the grey without grooming after she was brought in this morning, and I was rubbing her down myself when this lady came into the yard."

"I'll skin that nigger," cried the Colonel.

"I reckon I'll save you that trouble, sir," replied the son, as they turned garden-wards.

Silas had little use for "r's" and said "suh" for "sir" and "wah" for "war." He was also quite a different person in the presence of his father from what he was when alone or in the presence of strangers.

In the presence of his father, past generations spoke in his every word and action, he became sedate, deferential, leisurely. It was not fear of the elder man that caused this change, it was reflection from him.

The shadows were long in the garden, and away across the pastures, glimpsed beyond the cypress hedge and bordering the cotton fields, the pond-shadows cast by the live oaks at noon had become river shadows, flowing eastward; the murmur of bees filled the air like a haze of sound, and here and there as they passed a bush coloured flowers detached themselves and became butterflies.

They sat down on a great old stone bench lichened and sun warmed to enjoy the view, and the Colonel talked of tobacco and politics and cotton, including them all in his conversation in the grand patriarchal manner.

Phyl understanding little, and half drowsed by the warmth and the buzzing of the bees and the voice of the speaker, had given herself up to that lazy condition of mind which is the next best thing to sleep, when she was suddenly aroused. She was seated between Miss Pinckney and Silas. Silas had pinched her little finger.

She snatched her hand away, and turned towards him. He was looking away over the pastures; his profile showed nothing but its absolute correctness. Miss Pinckney had noticed nothing, and the Colonel, who had finished with cotton, looking at his watch, declared that it was close on dinner time.

After supper that night, Phyl found herself in the garden. Silas had not appeared at supper; the Colonel had brought down a book of old photographs, photographs of people and places dead or changed, and he and Miss Pinckney became so absorbed in them that they had little thought for the girl.

She went out to look at the moon, and it was worth looking at, rising like a honey coloured shield above the belt of the eastern woods.

The whole world was filled with the moonlight, warm tinted, and ghostly as the light of vanished days, white moths were flitting above the bushes, and on the almost windless air the voice of an owl came across the cotton fields.

Phyl reached the seat where they had all sat that afternoon. It was still warm from the all-day sunshine, and she sat down to rest and listen.

The owl had ceased crying, and through the league wide silence faint sounds far and near told of the life moving and thrilling beneath the night; the boom of a beetle, voices from the distant road, and now and then a whisper of wind rising and dying out across the garden and the trees.

A faint sound came from behind the seat, and before Phyl could turn two warm hands covered her eyes.

She plucked them away and stood up.

"I wish you wouldn't do things like that," she cried. "How dare you?"

"I couldn't help it," replied the other, "you looked so comfortable. I didn't mean to startle you. I thought you must have heard me coming across the grass."

"I didn't—and you shouldn't have done it."

"Well, I'm sorry. There, I've apologised, make friends."

"There is nothing to make friends about," she replied stiffly. "No, I don't want to shake hands—I'm not angry, let us go into the house."

"Don't," said Silas imploringly. "He and she are sitting over that old album, comparing notes. I saw them through the window, that's why I came to look for you in the garden. Do you know, I believe the Governor was gone once on Maria, years ago, but they never got married. He married my mother instead."

Phyl forgot her resentment.

The faint idea that Colonel Grangerson and Maria Pinckney had perhaps been more than friends in long gone days, had strayed across her mind, to be dismissed as a fancy. It interested her to find Silas confirming it.

"Of course, I can't say for certain," he went on, lighting a cigarette. "I only judge by the way they go on when they're together, and the way he talks of her. Say, do you ever want to grow old?"

"No, I don't—ever."

"Neither do I. I hope I'll be kicked to death by a horse, or drowned or shot before I'm forty. I don't want to die in any beds with doctors round me. I reckon if I'm ever like that I'll drink the liniment instead of the medicine—same as I nearly drenched Pap—and go to heaven with a red label for my ticket. Sit down for a while and let's talk."

"No, I don't care to sit down."

"I won't touch you. I promise."

Phyl hesitated a moment and then sat down. She was not afraid of Silas in the least, but his tricks of an overgrown boy did not please her; it seemed to her sometimes as though his irresponsibility was less an inheritance from youth, than from some ancestor ill-balanced to the point of craziness. If any other man of his age had acted and spoken to her as he had done she would have smacked his face, but Silas was Silas, and his good looks and seeming innocence, and something really charming that lay away at the back of his character and gave colour to this personality, managed, somehow, to condone his queerness of conduct.

All the same she sat a foot away from him on the seat, and kept her hands folded on her lap.

Silas sat for a while smoking in silence, then he spoke.

"Where's this you said you came from?"

"Ireland."

"You don't talk like a Paddy a bit."

"Don't I?"

"Not a bit, nor look like one."

"Have you seen many Irish people?"

"No, mostly in pictures—comic papers, you know, like Puck."

"I think it's a shame," broke out Phyl. "People are always making fun of the Irish, drawing them like monkeys with great upper lips—but it's only ignorant people who never travel who think of them like that."

"That's so, I expect," replied Silas, either unconscious of the dig at himself or undesirous of a quarrel, "and the next few dollars I have to spare I'll go to Ireland. I'm crazy now to see it."

"What's made you crazy to see it?"

"Because it's the place you come from."

Phyl sniffed.

"I hate compliments."

"I wasn't complimenting you, I was complimenting Ireland," said Silas sweetly. She was silent, a white moth passing close to her held her gaze for a moment, then it flitted away across the bushes.

"Let's forget Ireland for a moment," said she, "and talk of Charleston. Do you know many people there?"

"I know most every one. The Pinckneys and Calhouns and Tredegars and Revenalls and—"

"Rhetts."

"Yes—but there are a dozen Rhetts; same as there's half a hundred Pinckneys and Calhouns, families, I mean. What's his name—Richard Pinckney, your guardian, is engaged to a Rhett."

"He is not."

"He is—Venetia Frances, the one that lives in Legare Street. Why, I've seen them canoodling often, and every one says they are engaged."

"Well, he's not, or Miss Pinckney would have told me."

"Oh, she's blind. I tell you he is, and she'll be your guardian when he's married her."

"That she won't," said Phyl.

"How'll you help it? A man and wife are one."

"He's only guardian of my property."

"Well, Heaven help your property when she gets a finger in the pie; she'll spend it on hats—sure."

This outrageous statement, uttered with a laugh, left Phyl cold. The statement about Frances Rhett had disturbed her, she could not tell exactly why, for it was none of her business whom Pinckney might choose to marry—still—Frances Rhett! It was almost as though an antagonism had existed between them since that afternoon when she had seen Frances first, driving in the car with Richard Pinckney.

She rose to her feet and Silas rose also, throwing away the end of his cigarette.

"Going into the house?" said he.

"Yes!"

"Well, you'll be off to-morrow morning, and I won't see you, for I have to be out early, but I'll see you in Charleston, though not at Vernons maybe, for I'm not in love with Richard Pinckney, and I don't care much for visiting his house. But I'll see you somewhere, sure."

"Good-bye," said she holding out her hand. He took it, held it, and then, all of a sudden, she found herself in his arms.

Helpless as a child, in his arms and smothered with kisses. He kissed her on the mouth, on the forehead, on the chin, and with a last kiss on the mouth that made her feel as though her life were going from her, he vanished. Vanished amidst the bushes whilst she stood, tottering, dazed, breathless, outraged, yet—in some extraordinary way not angry. Pulled between tears and laughter, resentment, and a strange new feeling suddenly born in her from his burning lips, and the strength that had held her for a moment to itself.

In one moment, and as though with the stroke of a sword, Silas had cut down the barrier that had divided her from the reality of things. He had kissed away her childhood.

Then throwing out her hands as though pushing away some presence that was surrounding her, she ran to the house. In the hall she sat down for a moment to recover herself before going into the drawing room, where Miss Pinckney and the Colonel were closing the book which held for them the people and the places they had known in youth, and between its leaves who knows what old remembrances, like the withered flower that has once formed part of a summer's day.



CHAPTER IV

They started at ten o'clock next morning for Charleston, the Colonel standing on the house steps and waving his hand to them as they drove off. Silas was nowhere to be seen, he had gone out before breakfast, so the butler said, and had not returned. Miss Pinckney resented this casual treatment.

"He ought to have been here to bid us good-bye," said she, as they cleared the avenue. "He's got the name for being a mad creature, but even mad creatures may show common courtesy. I'm sure I don't know where he gets his manners from unless it's his mother's lot, same place as he got his good looks."

"Why do you say he's mad?" asked Phyl.

"Because he is. Not exactly mad, maybe, but eccentric, he swum Charleston harbour with his clothes on because some one dared him, and was nearly drowned with the tide coming in or going out, I forget which; and another day he got on the engine at Charleston station and started the train, drove it too, till they managed to climb over the top of the carriages or something and stop him—at least that's the story. He'll come to a bad end, that boy, unless he mends his ways. Lots of people say he's got good in him. So he has, perhaps, but it's just that sort that come to the worst end, unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time."

Phyl said nothing. Her mind was disturbed. She had slept scarcely at all during the night, and her feelings towards Silas Grangerson, now that she was beyond his reach, were alternating in the strangest way between attraction and repulsion.

They would have repelled the thought of him entirely but for the instinctive recognition of the fact that his conduct had been the result of impulse, the impulse of a child, ill governed, and accustomed to seize what it wanted. Added to that was the fact of his entire naturalness. From the moment of their first meeting he had talked to her as though they were old acquaintances. Unless when talking to his father, everything in his manner, tone, conversation was free, unfettered by convention, fresh, if at times startling. This was his great charm, and at the same time his great defect, for it revealed his want of qualities no less than his qualities.

Do what she could she was unable to escape from the incident of last night, it was as though those strong arms had not quite released their hold upon her, as though Pan had broken from the bushes, shown her by his magic things she had never dreamed of, and vanished.

It was nearly two o'clock when they reached Vernons. Richard Pinckney was at home, and at the sight of him Phyl's heart went out towards him. Clean, well groomed, honest, kindly, he was like a breath of fresh sea air after breathing tropical swamp atmosphere.

Strange to say Miss Pinckney seemed to feel somewhat the same.

"Yes, we're back," said she, as they passed into the dining-room where some refreshments were awaiting them, "and glad I am to be back. Vernons smells good after Grangersons. Oh, dear me, what is it that clings to that place? It's like opening an old trunk that's been shut for years. I told Seth Grangerson, right out flat, he ought to get away from there into the world somewhere, but there he sits clinging to his rheumatism and the past. I declare I nearly cried last night as he was showing me all those old pictures."

"He's not very ill then," said Richard.

"Ill! Not he. It was that fool Silas sent the telegram. Just an attack of rheumatism."

She went upstairs to change and the two young people went into the garden, where Richard Pinckney was having some alterations done.

On the day Phyl's hair went up it seemed to Richard that a new person had come to live with them. Phyl had suddenly turned into a young woman—and such a young woman! He had never considered her looks before, to young men of his age and temperament girls in pigtails are, as far as the manhood in them is concerned, little more and sometimes less than things. But Phyl with her hair up was not to be denied, and had he not been philandering after Frances Rhett, and had Phyl been a total stranger suddenly seen, it is quite possible that a far warmer feeling than admiration might have been the result. As it was she formed a new interest in life.

He showed her the alterations he was making, slight enough and causing little change in the general plan of the garden.

"I scarcely like doing anything," said he, "but that new walk will be no end of an improvement, and it will save that bit of grass which is being trodden to death by people crossing it, then there's all those bushes by the gate, they're going, those behind the tree,—a little space there will make all the difference in the world."

"Behind the magnolia?"

"Yes."

"I wish you wouldn't," said Phyl.

"Why?"

"Because they have been there always and—well, look!"

She led the way behind the tree, pushed the bushes aside and disclosed the seat.

She no longer felt that she was betraying a secret. Her experience at Grangersons had in some way made Vernons seem to her now really her home, and Richard Pinckney closer to her in relationship.

"Why, how did you know that was there?" said Richard. "I've never seen it."

"Juliet Mascarene used to sit there with—with some one she was in love with. I found some of her old letters and they told about it—see, it's a little arbour, used to be, though it's all so overgrown now."

"Juliet," said he. "That was the girl who died. I have heard Aunt Maria talk about her and she keeps her room just as it used to be. Who was the somebody?"

"It was a Mr. Rupert Pinckney."

"I knew there was a love story of some sort connected with her, but I never worried about the details. So they used to come and sit here."

"Yes, he'd come to the gate at night and she'd meet him. Her people did not want her to marry him and so they had to meet in secret."

"That was a long time ago."

"Before you were born," said Phyl.

He looked at her.

"Aunt is always saying how like you are to her," said he, "but she's mad on family likenesses, and I never thought of it. It may be a want in me but I've never taken much interest in dead relatives; but somehow, finding this little place tucked away here gives one a jog. It's like finding a nest in a tree. How long have you known of it?"

"Oh, some time. I found a bundle of her old letters—" she paused. Richard Pinckney had taken his place on the little seat, just as one sits down in an armchair to see if it is comfortable, and was leaning back amidst the bush branches.

"This is all right," said he, "sit down, there's lots of room—you found her letter, tell us all about it."

Phyl sat down and told the little story. It seemed to interest him.

"The Pinckneys lost money," said he, "and that's why the old Mascarene birds were set against her marrying him, I suppose. Makes one wild that sort of thing. What right have people to interfere?"

"Money seems everything in this world," said Phyl.

"It's not—it seems to be, but it's not. Money can't buy happiness after one is grown up. You remember I told you that over in Ireland; when candy and fishing rods mean happiness money is all right—after that money is useful enough, but it's the making of it and not the spending it that counts,—that and a lot of things that have nothing to do with money. If the Mascarenes hadn't been fools they'd have seen that a poor man with kick in him—and the Pinckneys always had that—was as good as a rich man, and those two might have got married."

"No," said Phyl, "they never could have got married, he had to die. He was killed, you know, at the beginning of the war."

"You're a fatalist."

"Well, things happen."

"Yes, but you can stop them happening very often."

"How?"

"Just by willing it."

"Yes," said Phyl meditatively, "but how are you to use your will against what comes unexpectedly. Now that telegram yesterday morning took me to Grangersons with Miss Pinckney. Suppose—suppose I had broken my leg or, say, fallen into a well there and got drowned—that would have been Fate."

"No," said Pinckney, "carelessness, the telegram would not have drowned you, but your carelessness in going too close to the well."

"Suppose," said Phyl, "instead of that, Mr. Silas Grangerson had shot me by accident with a gun—the telegram would have brought me to that without any carelessness of mine."

"No, it couldn't," said Pinckney lightly, "it would still have been your own fault for going near such a hare-brained scamp. Oh, I'm only joking, what I really mean is that nine times out of ten the thing people call Fate is nothing more than want of foresight."

"And the tenth time it is Fate," said Phyl rising.



CHAPTER V

Next morning brought Phyl a letter. It came by the early post, so that she got it in her bedroom before coming down.

Phyl had few correspondents and she looked at the envelope curiously before opening it.

"Miss Berknowles, at Vernons. Charleston."

ran the address written in a large, boyish, yet individual hand. She knew at once and by instinct whom it was from.

"I'm coming to Charleston in a day or two, and I want to see you," ran the letter which had neither address nor date, "but I'm not coming to Pinckneys. I'll be about town and sure to find you somewhere. I can't get you out of my mind since last night. Tried to, but can't."

That was all. Phyl put the letter back in its envelope. She was not angry, she was disturbed. There was an assurance about Silas Grangerson daunting in its simplicity and directness. Something that raised opposition to him in her heart, yet paralysed it. Instinct told her to avoid him, to drive him from her mind, ay and something more than instinct. The spirit of Vernons, the calm sweet soul of the place, that seemed to hold the past and the present, Juliet and herself, peace and happiness with the promise of all good things in the future, this spirit rose up against Silas Grangerson as though he were the antagonist to happiness and peace, Juliet and herself, the present and the past.

Rose up, without prevailing entirely.

Silas had impressed himself upon her mind in such a manner that she could not free herself from the impression. Young as she was, with the terribly clear perception of the male character which all women possess in different degrees, she recognised that Silas was dangerous to that logical and equitable state of existence we call happiness, not on account of his wildness or his eccentricities, but because of some want inherent in his nature, something that spoke vaguely in his words and his actions, in his handsome face and in his careless and graceful manner.

All the same she could not free herself from the impression he had made upon her, she could not drive him from her mind, he had in some way paralysed her volition, called forces to his aid from some unknown part of her nature, perhaps with those kisses which she still felt upon the very face of her soul.

She came down to breakfast, and afterwards finding herself alone with Miss Pinckney, she took Silas's letter from her pocket and handed it to her. She had been debating in her own mind all breakfast time as to whether she ought to show the letter; the struggle had been between her instinct to do the right thing, and a powerful antagonism to this instinct which was a new thing in her.

The latter won.

And then, lo and behold, when she found herself alone with Miss Pinckney in the sunlit breakfast room, almost against her will and just as though her hand had moved of its own volition, she put it in her pocket and produced the letter.

Miss Pinckney read it.

"Well, of all the crazy creatures!" said she. "Why, he has only met you once. He's mad! No, he isn't—he's a Grangerson. I know them."

She stopped short and re-read the letter, turned it about and then laid it down.

"Just as if he'd known you for years. And you scarcely spoke to him. Did he say anything to you as if he cared for you?"

"No, he didn't," said Phyl quite truthfully.

"Did he look at you as if he cared for you?"

"No," replied the other, dreading another question. But Miss Pinckney did not put it. She could not conceive a man kissing a girl who had never betrayed his feelings for her by word or glance.

"Well, it gets me. It does indeed; acting like a dumb creature and then writing this— Do you care for him?"

"I—I—no—you see, I don't know him—much."

"Well, he seems to know you pretty well, there's no doubt about one thing, Silas Grangerson can make up his mind pretty quick. He won't come to Vernons, won't he? Well, maybe it's better for him not, for I've no patience with oddities. That's what's wrong with him, he's an oddity, and it's those sort of people make the trouble in life—they're worse than whisky and cards for bringing unhappiness. Years and years and years ago—I'm telling you this though I've never told it to any one else—Seth Grangerson, Silas's father, seemed to care for me, not much, still he seemed to care. Then one day all at once he came into the room where I was, through the window, and told me to come off and get married to him, wanted me to go away right off. I was a fool in those days, but not all a fool, and when he tried to put his arm round my waist, my hand went up and smacked his face.

"We are good enough friends now, but I've often thought of what I escaped by not marrying him. You saw him and the life he's leading at that out of the way place, but you didn't see his obstinacy and his queerness, and Silas is ten times worse, more crazy—well, there, you're warned—but mind you I don't want to be meddling. I've seen so many carefully prepared marriages turn out pure miseries, and so many crazy matches turn out happily, that I'm more than cautious in giving advice. Seems to me that people before they are married are quite different creatures to what they turn out after they are married."

"But I don't want to get married," said Phyl.

"No, but, seems to me, Silas does," replied the other.



CHAPTER VI

One bright morning three days later, as Phyl was crossing Meeting Street near the Charleston Hotel, whom should she meet but Silas.

Silas in town get up, quite a different looking individual from the Silas of Grangersons, dressed in perfectly fitting light grey tweed, a figure almost condoning one for the use of that old-time, half-discredited word "Elegant."

"There you are," said Silas, his face lighting up. "I thought it wouldn't be long before I met you. Meeting Street is like a rabbit run, and I reckon the whole of Charleston passes through it twice a day."

His manner was genuinely frank and open, and he seemed to have completely forgotten the incident of the kissing. Phyl said nothing for a moment; she felt put out, angry at having been caught like a rabbit, and not over pleased at being compared to one.

Then she spoke freezingly enough:

"I don't know much about the habits of Charleston; you will not find me here every day. I have only been out twice here alone and—I'm in a hurry."

"Why, what's the matter with you?" cried Silas in a voice of astonishment.

"Nothing."

"But there is, you're not angry with me, are you?"

"Not in the least," replied the other, quite determined to avoid being drawn into explanations.

"Well, that's all right. You don't mind my walking with you a bit?"

"No!"

"I only came here last night, and I'm putting up at the Charleston," said Silas. "Of course there are a lot of friends I could stay with but I always prefer being free; one is never quite free in another person's house; for one thing you can't order the servants about, though, upon my word, now-a-days one can't do that, much, anywhere."

"I suppose not," said Phyl.

The fact was being borne in upon her that Silas in town was a different person from Silas in the country, or seemed so; more sedate and more conventional. She also noticed as they walked along that he was saluted by a great many people, and also, before she had done with him that morning, she noticed that the leery, impudent looking, coloured folk seemed to come under a blight as they passed him, giving him the wall and yards to spare. It was as though the impersonification of the blacksnake whip were walking with her as well as a most notoriously dangerous man, a man who would strike another down, white or coloured, for a glance, not to say a word.

She had come out on business, commissioned by Miss Pinckney to purchase a ball of magenta Berlin wool. Miss Pinckney still knitted antimacassars, and the construction of antimacassars is impossible without Berlin wool—that obsolete form of German Frightfulness.

She bestowed the things on poor folk to brighten their homes.

When Phyl went into the store to buy the wool Silas waited outside, and when she came out they walked down the street together.

She had intended returning straight home after making her purchase but they were walking now not towards Vernons but towards the Battery.

"What do you do with yourself all day?" asked Silas, suddenly breaking silence.

"Oh, I don't know," she replied, "nothing much—we go out for drives."

"In that old basket carriage thing?"

"With Miss Pinckney."

"I know, I've seen her often—what else do you do?"

"Oh, I read."

"What do you read?"

"Books."

"Doesn't Pinckney ever take you out?"

"No, I don't go out much with Mr. Pinckney; you see, he's generally so busy."

Silas sniffed. They had reached the Battery and were standing looking over the blue water of the harbour. The day was perfect, dreamy, heavenly, warm and filled with sea scents and harbour sounds; scarcely a breath of wind stirred across the water where a three-master was being towed to her moorings by a tug.

"She's coming up to the wharves," said Silas. "They steer by the spire of St. Philips, the line between there and Fort Sumpter is all deep water. How'd you like to be a sailor?"

"Wouldn't mind," said Phyl.

"How'd you like to take a boat—I mean a decent sized fishing yawl and go off round the world, or even down Florida way? Florida's fine, you don't know Florida, it's got two coasts and it's hard to tell which is the best. From Indian River right round and up to Cedar Keys there's all sorts of fishing, and you can camp out on the reefs; one cooks one's own food and you can swim all day. There's tarpon and barracuda and sword fish, and nights when there's a moon you could see to read a book."